The state’s management scheme for game mammals is in serious need of an overhaul and recently proposed revisions to hunting rules are only a minor improvement, conservationists say.
But instead of merely lifting bag and season limits in certain sensitive areas, the state Division of Forestry and Wildlife (DOFAW) should declare open season on all game mammals on state land, they argue. And except where public safety is a concern, hunters should be able to use whatever methods they want.
What’s more, their claims that the state’s rules aren’t scientifically or rationally based is supported by new research on hunting trends over the past 125 or so years.
Rick Warshauer, a botanist and Big Island resident, recommended that the rules be approved only on condition that the Department of Land and Natural Resources present to its board by the end of July an entirely re-drafted set.
The Conservation Council for Hawai`i also sees the rule revisions as an opportunity to improve the current paradigm by reducing feral ungulate damage while providing hunters with better access to animals.
“If feral ungulates and game mammals are going to continue to be managed on a sustained yield basis for hunting, these animals should be confined to appropriate hunting areas and fenced in,” writes CCH executive director Marjorie Ziegler in her comments on the rules.
Comments must be submitted to the Department of Land and Natural Resources by January 10.
Shifting Policies
Unlike the mainland, where the vast majority of game species are native, all of Hawai`i’s are introduced. And the native species that might have been candidates for game hunting, such as the nene, are either endangered, protected, or gone, says Christopher Lepczyk, a professor at the University of Hawai`i’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Management.
Since the late 1700s, countless birds and ungulates have been imported to Hawai`i as game, the bulk of them arriving after World War II, according to new research by Lepczyk’s graduate student, Deirdre Duffy. The boom in new game species introductions occurred as hunting was peaking on the mainland. DOFAW, trying to adopt more of a mainland-style hunting regime here, introduced mouflon, pronghorn antelope, black-tailed deer, and mouflon-sheep hybrids, Lepczyk says.
The move proved disastrous for the forests.
According to Warshauer, the decision to promote hunting in the latter half of the 1900s reversed progress made during the first half to contain and remove thousands of ungulates from Hawai`i’s forests to protect watershed functions.
“A focus on hunting interests displaced traditional forest protection activities under the myth of multiple-use management,” he writes in testimony to DOFAW. Forest reserve fences were left to degrade, allowing ungulates to enter and multiply. And now, “a huge portion of our native plants and animals and their habitats are threatened with extinction or already gone,” he writes, with ungulates being the main cause.
“The wholesale damage to the native Hawaiian landscape by ungulates was the primary reason for the establishment of the forest reserve system in the first place, on both public and privately owned lands about a century ago,” he writes.
In the 1940s, hunters were harvesting between 10,000 and 12,000 mammals a year. Today, it’s down to six or seven thousand, according to Duffy’s analysis of public records.
Environmental and cultural concerns stopped the introduction of new game mammals in Hawai`i in the mid-1970s. But by then, those that had become established were wreaking havoc.
Warshauer argues that the state has not only failed to control the ungulate threat, it has fueled it:
“[T]he somewhat liberalized hunting restrictions (bag limits, seasons, etc.) have received a fair amount of negative feedback in some hunter comments on this draft, but remain so restrictive that a positive change in impacts to native plants and animals still cannot be expected. Even more egregious is the long-running debacle on Mauna Kea,” where ungulates have decimated the mamane trees used by the endangered palila for food.
Decades ago, the late U.S. Judge Samuel King ordered the state to remove goats, sheep and mouflon from the Mauna Kea forest reserve and palila critical habitat.
Early on, Warshauer writes, the DLNR was on the verge of eradicating ungulates from the reserve, but an apparent change in policy dropped the rate of removal below the rates of ungulate replacement. The population then grew and spread.
“They now freely re-enter the Mauna Kea [forest reserve]. In accepted game management methodology, this implementation is called sustained yield management, not removal. These hybrid animals, intentional creations of the DLNR on Mauna Kea, are capable of breaching the standard conservation fences that previously protected native biological resources from goats, sheep and pigs, rendering all such fences obsolete unless subject to expensive upgrades,” he writes.
In one core palila habitat on Mauna Kea, the DLNR limited ungulate removal method to archery, “fortunately reversed in this draft,” Warshauer says, since ungulate impacts have increased and the birds’ population plummeted in the meantime.
Warshauer describes a similar situation with the endangered nene in the Kipuka Ainahou Nene Sanctuary. Mammal hunting there is also limited to archery, in addition to seasonal and bag limits.
“The result has been a breeding ground for mouflon, which compete for food resources with the nene, another one-sided management balance where the native species lose by design,” he writes.
“For decades, numerous scientific evaluations and public observations have been redundant in pointing to the many ways that these ungulates have damaged species and their habitats, and made them prone to displacement by invasive plants. This evaluation has not been subject to logical refutation by any credible DLNR studies, nor has there been real change in DLNR [forest reserve] policy or implementation of any substantive hunting rule changes to reverse the degradation. This draft is much the same,” Warshauer says.
‘No Rational Basis’
How the state determines appropriate take levels of game mammals in general is a mystery and one of Warshauer’s biggest complaints.
A reading of the rules reveals that hunting is treated inconsistently across different areas. For example, across the various components of the state’s Natural Area Reserves System, which represents the best of the best native habitat in the state, there is no uniform approach to managing hunting.
The proposed rules eliminate public hunting without an animal control permit from all NARS units on O`ahu, Maui and Moloka`i. For Hawai`i island units, DOFAW proposes lifting bag and season limits, while in Kaua`i’s Hono O Na Pali NAR, it would limit take to two animals per hunter per day.
DOFAW did not return calls by press time asking for an explanation of the apparent inconsistency in rules regarding the NARS. One possible reason is that the division is close to eradicating ungulates in certain NARs, for example, Pahole NAR on O`ahu.
But, writes Warshauer, “There is no rational basis for setting seasons or bag limits or requiring tags anywhere within the public lands designated for hunting. There is no field data gathering to verify or guide why such limits are appropriate in some areas but not others within this large landscape—it is all arbitrary. Even the requirement to check-in and fill out hunter-take forms is a total waste.”
He argues that the DLNR has not conducted any serious studies on ungulate numbers, ranges, reproductive rates, food habits, impacts or life history since retired Big Island branch chief Jon Giffin’s work nearly thirty years ago. He adds that the department has not even used Giffin’s data in setting hunting areas and restrictions
.
“It is all determined by the seat-of-the-pants,” he writes, adding that he believes the rules merely reflect the views of various fiefdoms with the department.
On the mainland, Lepczyk says, hunting license fees pay for wildlife biologists to manage wildlife populations and restore habitat and conservation officers collect data from hunters on the sex and age of animals taken, and where they were taken from. Hawai`i, which has low hunting fees, has no equivalent, he says.
Data are self-reported here and people don’t report much other than number of animals harvested and a rough location, he says.
Annual harvest reports submitted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service aren’t consistent, he adds. “Some years, there’s missing data, some years it’s not very complete.”
Even Duffy’s numbers are probably not accurate, Lepczyk says, since he believes that hunters report only half of the game mammals they take. The other half are poached, he says.
“There is the thought that different islands and different game areas have marked differences,” in terms of reporting accuracy, he says, with one possible reason being that some hunters may not want others to know how rich an area is or how much they’ve taken, so they under-report.
He says that the older harvest reports are much more complete than more recent ones.
“Different islands have not participated as fully at times. I think a lot of evidence suggests they’re not very accurate and sometimes you can even see that in the data,” he says, noting, as an example, that experts believe take levels reported for the island of Hawai`i are much lower than they really are.
Even so, Lepczyk believes the general trends Duffy has identified are accurate. On Hawai`i island, bird takes are increasing while there’s been a steep decrease in mammals hunted. Hunting is increasing for both birds and mammals on Kaua`i and decreasing on Maui. Trends on O`ahu are generally flat.
Duffy’s efforts to gather hunting data have revealed some real fundamental problems, Lepczyk says.
“We don’t collect data very well. … Arguably, nobody has population estimates of any game species,” he says, adding that most states try to estimate a population size for a game species and then try to manage it at some level.
He adds that even conservation organizations don’t record and compile sex or age data on culls.
“Hawai`i is challenged, even with native species that we care a lot about. We don’t have good monitoring. It’s not something that gets funded,” he says.
The Big Picture
A very small percentage – perhaps as little as 3 percent – of Hawai`i’s population hunts. Even so, achieving consensus on how game species in Hawai`i should be treated is “very challenging” with so many different stakeholders, Lepczyk says. In addition to comments from conservationists like Warshauer, the state has received responses from animal rights activists calling for a ban on the use of hunting dogs.
To Warshauer and Ziegler, however, consensus is not necessarily to immediate goal. To them, the legal issues must be dealt with first of all.
Warshauer points out that the state may be liable for damages caused by animals they are charged with managing.
“As long as the state/DLNR is promoting the spread of ungulate impacts tacitly—forget the stated intent—is there not a responsibility for these impacts? Decades ago, Judge King thought so in the limited case of sheep, goats and mouflon on Mauna Kea. What will other judges and plaintiffs’ attorneys think in the larger arena? Who pays if the decision goes badly for the state? This situation needs to change, and the BLNR should be a primary agent of needed change, starting now,” he argues.
Ziegler adds that managing feral ungulates and game mammals in critical habitat for threatened and endangered species requires an incidental take permit and a habitat conservation plan.
A Summary of the Proposed Hunting Rules Amendments
•Re-establish by rules the hunting fees that were in place on December 31, 2007, the date of an appellate court ruling on game bird hunting fees.
•Update conditions, seasons, new hunting areas, safety zones, and closed areas.
•Establish provisions for disabled hunting permits to comply with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.
•Add provisions to allow temporary closure of public hunting areas to address imminent threats to public safety or natural resources or to comply with the requirements of lessees.
•Update the description and maps of public hunting areas to reflect current conditions, boundaries, additions, removals, or changes in land designations.
•Remove the Natural Area Reserves from public hunting for O`ahu, Maui, and Moloka`i. The Division will continue to issue animal control permits to the public whenever it is safe, feasible, and effective to do so.
•Remove the bag limits for all game mammals in all the NARS on Hawai`i Island.
•Change the conditions for hunting game mammals in some areas of Kaua`i to insure hunting opportunities.
•Modify the conditions for some units that support sensitive native resources, watersheds, and areas of federally designated critical habitat to daily hunting year round.
•Establish the minimum age of hunting as 10 years old.
•Add the Pu`u Mali Mitigation area on Hawai`i island for game bird hunting.
•Add agricultural lands as new public hunting areas on Kaua`i.
Teresa Dawson
Volume 21, Number 7 — January 2011
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